Thursday, November 22, 2007

Desk duty again

I have desk duty in the manuscript reading room again. Usually, I get Thursday afternoons. It has been quite busy here with several people doing research and reading. One wanted a detailed map of a parish in northern Sweden, and another was interested in a book on geology from 1706, for instance.

The head of the historical collections told me he has started to plan for the new exhibit opening in February. The topic will be the Roskilde peace treaty of 1658 and the war preceding it. The Danes and the Swedes fought bitter wars in the 17th century. In the negotiations, the Danes lost almost half of its land to Sweden. Skåne, Halland and Blekinge provinces were suddenly to belong to Sweden instead. The people living here weren't happy about this development, to say the least. The Swedish king did everything he could to make the people Swedish. He founded Lund University, installed Swedish pastors in the parishes and distributed hymnal books and bibles in the Swedish language. Somehow, this is what we are going to make an exhibit of. We have a fairly large number of books printed around this time, but it's mostly texts about the peace treaty and odes to the Swedish king. It might be a little boring to look at in an exhibit, so we will have to make it more interesting here, I think.

Tomorrow I will go to visit my mother for the weekend, so the next blog entry will not be written until next week.